


Fusce ut Flamma

by Rueluxxx



Series: Flamma [1]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: BAMF Bucky Barnes, Bucky Barnes Remembers, Bucky Barnes Revenge Road Trip, Bucky Barnes-centric, Gen, I just want him to be happy for once, Kind of Wizard!Bucky, Kind of a crossover, Magical creature!Bucky, Not Captain America: The Winter Soldier Compliant, Winter Soldier Doesn't Give A Fuck, i have no idea what i am doing, sort of a prequel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-13
Updated: 2016-09-13
Packaged: 2018-08-14 20:11:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,177
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8027386
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rueluxxx/pseuds/Rueluxxx
Summary: Phoenix, noun, a bird that lived five centuries, died and was reborn from its own ashes.Bucky Barnes is not his first name, but it is his favorite. When his fire was red and orange and the blue was only a little speck in the great mass of sunset, it was warm, and he could heal. Now his flames are cold and azure blue, and he use it to kill.The blue coat tails billowed away from him, shimmered in the purple light, as if they were wings of a great hawk, or the tail feathers of a burning phoenix.





	Fusce ut Flamma

Hydra gave him ten trigger words. Words pulled from the worst moments of his life to drag that exhaustion and despair from him and the only way he could cope with all of that emotion that they conditioned him not to feel, was to disappear for a moment, into the recess of his own mind, leaving his body with no control and no master. 

Vulnerable.

Longing. Oh, how you ache for gentle hands and familiar faces, yearning for a life stolen away. You don’t deserve it. You’ll never scrub the blood from your hands. There is no one coming to save you.

Rusted. Not the gleaming metal of your arm, they would never allow that. You’re decaying on the inside, your mind a wasteland of rusted parts that don’t turn the way they are supposed to. Who are you? Who were you? Machine or human being? You don’t know the difference.

Seventeen. Something inside of you fills with anguish as you look at the pale face of the boy you just killed. Following orders. He’s tiny, all bloodstained blode hair and empty blue eyes. Something in your mind screams because he looks like someone you think you knew. They beat you for it. You know no one. You are a tool. You try to remember why he was familiar, but there is nothing. Only the bitter cold.

Daybreak. When was the last time you saw the sun? You don’t remember. Even when you’re outside, your skin is covered in black cloth and smeared blood. No amount of light can warm the frost from your bones. The sun will never grace you with her heat again. You are a creature of winter.

Furnace. Explosions in trenches and the screams of men you no longer remember ring in your ears. You can see those haunting blue eyes surrounded by flame, screaming for you to leave. Not without him. You’d rather die. You are in hell.

Nine. Not the kind of hell that is all fire and brimstone. That’s reserved for the lustful and envious. You are in the ninth circle, encased to your waist in ice. You read in school about the ninth circle being the prison of Lucifer. You shiver with cod and realize you’re the devil. You’ve become him.

Benign. There is still a part of you inside, locked away where they will never find him that is kind. He weeps at what you’ve become, trapped in his own mind, screaming to break free. When he manages to escape, they lock him back away with bloody fists and blue shocks of electricity. He learns to stay huddled away where they can’t hurt him. Silent. Broken.

Homecoming. Home is chaos and death and destruction - frost in your hair and a chill that never leaves. It used to be a boy. The one with the wide blue eyes that stayed burned in your splintered memory no matter how much they beat you. He’s gone now. You’re never going home.

One. The lowest cardinal number. Half of two. Half of a whole. Lonely, desolate, broken, hurt. You are alone. Truly and utterly alone.

Freight car. Where it all began. A glimpse of those terrified blue eyes - the brush of a gloved hand - and then you’re falling next to white snowflakes as you hurtle toward the earth. It’s peaceful, still. And then, you become one with the cold, your blood staining the pure white all around you. They drag you away, but that’s not what made you. It was the fall. You’ve become the bitter chill of winter.

So you gave yourself trigger words, thick chains and complicated nets to bind that sun underneath the desert of winter, protecting the one last piece of human warmth he has left. He locked his magic, his spells, his friends and comrades and Steve’s names and memory inside that sun, and lashed out with purple lightning to drive away any electricity that attempts to burn them away.

He gave each of his chains a word, a name. The last strand of security he could garner for himself. He knew he could break free at any moment, burn the entire facility to the ground and destroy the ashes. He knew, he could. But he was waiting. Waiting for something. For a signal, for a word. For the news or the name that could tell him, it’s safe to be back again.

He never failed a mission, but always left them with the barest hope of survival. That if their doctors worked hard enough, they could bring his mission back, drag their white stained soul back from the dead.

Sergeant. His first chain. It loosened at night, a desolate road, a car leaking gasoline. There was an old man tugging at his jacket. He looked down, and the man called him Sergeant. So he remembered. Not nearly enough to let the sun loose, but enough warmth was out into the desert for him to do something. He used his wizard spells on a muggle to give them more years, the spell not at all successful without a wand, and duplicated the blue serums, giving back the poison as a mission report. Five years was enough to tie up loose ends.

Star. That’s how he knew he could be safe. He looks for stars in a pair of blue eyes and stars in strands of blonde hair and stars flying in a background of white and blue and red. That’s how he knew he’s home, when he saw stars drifting and shifting on ceilings and constellations rearing their star filled heads. The sun inside of him is also a star. The stars that he saw on a mission was a star. He looks for stars on his handler’s eyes, in his mission’s hair, and in his facilities walls. He asked for a red star to be painted on his metal arm after an assassination of a politician, surprisingly, his handler obliges and the star never fades.

Dungeon. 

He has never been to the castle as James Barnes, never looked at the high ceiling and the thick walls with his own green blue eyes, never touched the giant squid and stepped foot into the Forbidden Forest. Never tasted a potion with his own tongue and never read any of the library books that taught him almost everything he knew. But he has been there, has experienced them, has been a student in a great magical school.

He has lived in a damp but warm dungeon for seven years, made friends with cynical but royal people, ate greasy but filling food, read thick but great tomes. He has experienced all of it, without ever being there. But it was home, the same way Brooklyn was home, the same way Steve was home. The same way he felt at home in green, underwater, underground. All the dark facilities he has been stuffed into has never fazed him because seven years underground a thousand-year-old castle has taught him that night and dark will always be his friend.

Conquer.

The 107th and the Commandos often joked among themselves about their sergeant. His iron will in the face of death, his steady hands in the face of danger, his cold eyes in the face of killing. He hasn’t got the heart to tell them that he has seen all of it before. He has been in two great wars, rifles swapped from wands, bullets swapped for bright explosive lights, five-second grenades for potions in vials that would be hurled into the ranks of dark robed figures.

He had to work twice as hard as everyone else in a House that value birth and status more than talent and hard work. But he achieved it, he conquered it. He road out into the battlefield with a wicked grin and a blue cloak that billowed out like wings. Eyes already singing victory.

Phoenix.

That’s what he is. A never ending creature, destined to kill himself in flames, bury his loved ones in flames, scatter his ashes into a new world and reborn in flames. In the end, he will always die. But he gets to decide when he burns, and who to bring down with him. The flames have always protected him, armed him, gave him one last weapon for himself if nothing else remains. If he will it, his flames will roll out into the desolate mindscape in his head and burn all of the steel and iron that they implanted within him. He would scream in exhilaration, and laugh in cold joy as he burned whatever base around him to the ground.

He confunded his primary handlers, the writers of the red book into writing his own trigger words into the original sequence. Decade by decade, year by year, all of the words were added and ciphered and locked away, and he waited for the day where someone is desperate and cruel enough to utter all of the control sequences at once.

It was a greasy old man with ash blond hair and dim blue eyes that woke him up, new and too confident in his position and his control. He said the complete sequence, and after he stopped screaming, after the sun and its flames burned his mind to ash and dust, he told the Winter Soldier to kill Steve Rogers. 

He smiled, his white teeth showing. The metal plates of his arm whirled and shifted, calibrated and re-calibrated. He laughed, hung his head, his greasy curls hiding his eyes. He laughed some more and finally spoke when the greasy man started to raise a hand to slap him.

“Ignis.”

The chair he was sitting on burst into flames, cold and azure blue, making everyone around him shield their eyes and yell in arms and bolt for the door. The blue flames spread out, hot tendrils reaching out like limbs and branches and arms turning white-hot and searing when touched a surface of a limb or metal.

There was screaming, gunshots, more screaming, yelling and barking and just screams and screams and screams. 

He painted the name Hydra in big red letters on the hot concrete ground, reasonably sure that every letter agency in the world could have the best HD image of the destruction a mysterious entity has left in his wake. He trusted his Steve to see, but not enough for him to come running after himself. 

He cleaned out whatever mess of wires and clips that Russia and Hydra have fused into his prosthesis, fused a piece of his own blue feather into the metal, stole adamantium and vibranium and mithril to strengthen the one inorganic material permanently attached to his body, making that bulk of a machine into a wand.

He set out to find the different facilities and bases with nothing but an arsenal of knives and daggers and guns and grenades and potions vials stuffed to every contour of his black tactical gear, the mask still on his face, his hair cropped shorter but longer than the Bucky Barnes from seventy years ago.

His green eyes now burn a cold blue flame in its depths. He wants everyone that he ever meets in his burnings to recognize those flames. The lightning that sprout from his silver fingertips, the explosions from his flesh hand that they did not take away.

He wrote short phrases in the doorways of decimated building. All of them in some shade of red and all to a little scrawny boy from Brooklyn that never made it past his 21st birthday.

-

The first and only clear picture that Natasha captured of the AWOL Winter Soldier was almost two months in his fiery revenge rampage throughout the States.

It has a backdrop of ash and dust and still burning white and red and blue flames against an absurdly beautiful purple sky. It’s sunset, the stars are starting to come out, there're flocks of birds flying in a V-shape across the horizon. There're red block letters painted on the ground, almost right before the presumed welcome mat of the base.

The Soldier was turning sideways, stopping in his strut into the sunset, his green eyes the only thing visible between that black muzzle mask and his mop of brown curls, and in that particular picture, there were blue flames burning inside them. Steve could see the metal arm, the red star glaring out against the black gear and weapons, a sort of blue feather was also etched on a plate beneath, a great blue coat was the only thing hiding the arsenal stuffed on his body from being seen.

There was wind blowing against him in the photo as he looked calmly in the supposed invisible camera. The big red letters on the edge of the picture inking his hair a strange sort of bronze.

“Where can I find the end of the line, Fusce?”

The blue coat tails billowed away from him, shimmered in the purple light, as if they were wings of a great hawk, or the tail feathers of a burning phoenix.

**Author's Note:**

> Ignis~Latin~ watch-fire  
> Fusce ~ Latin ~ Clinnical, Steve
> 
> I wrote this because I was getting too emotional with all of the fics on Bucky Barnes that hurts so much when you read them, whether you are watching him Recover or his Times Under Hydra or just him Eating A Bagel, everything hurts! I just want to write something where everything is perfect, because I can do whatever stupid Mary Sue shit I want. 
> 
> English is not my first language. This is just for fun.


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